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2016-02-11 Security Update Release

Posted on 2016-02-11 by PostgreSQL Global Development Group

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of our database system, including 9.5.1, 9.4.6, 9.3.11, 9.2.15, and 9.1.20. This release fixes two security issues, as well as several bugs found over the last four months. Users vulnerable to the security issues should update their installations immediately; other users should update at the next scheduled downtime.

Security Fixes for Regular Expressions, PL/Java

This release closes security hole CVE-2016-0773, an issue with regular expression (regex) parsing. Prior code allowed users to pass in expressions which included out-of-range Unicode characters, triggering a backend crash. This issue is critical for PostgreSQL systems with untrusted users or which generate regexes based on user input.

The update also fixes CVE-2016-0766, a privilege escalation issue for users of PL/Java. Certain custom configuration settings (GUCS) for PL/Java will now be modifiable only by the database superuser.

Other Fixes and Improvements

In addition to the above, many other issues were patched in this release based on bugs reported by our users over the last few months. This includes multiple fixes for new features introduced in version 9.5.0, as well as refactoring of pg_dump to eliminate a number of chronic issues with backing up EXTENSIONs. Among them are:

Updating

Users of version 9.4 will need to reindex any jsonb_path_ops indexes they have created, in order to fix a persistent issue with missing index entries. Users of other versions who have skipped multiple update releases may need to perform additional post-update steps; see the Release Notes for details.

All PostgreSQL update releases are cumulative. As with other minor releases, users are not required to dump and reload their database or use pg_upgrade in order to apply this update release; you may simply shut down PostgreSQL and update its binaries.